MOBILE, Ala. - In 1972, an ambitious young politician named Bay Haas stood on the tarmac at Brookley Field in Mobile and vowed, as a first-time candidate for Mobile County commissioner, that he would bring jobs back to the former Air Force base.

On Monday, Haas returned to that same tarmac for a moment that was four decades in the making: Airbus formally broke ground at Brookley on a $600 million factory that will assemble commercial A320 jets.

“Let the record show,” quipped Haas, among the sea of people gathered for the event, “that I keep my campaign promises.”

Haas, now retired in Mobile, was one of many who had a hand in landing a project that could transform the Alabama economy in ways not seen since Mercedes-Benz arrived in Tuscaloosa County in 1994.

Mercedes, followed by Honda, Hyundai and dozens of automotive suppliers, ushered in a wave of foreign direct investment that catapulted Alabama to become the nation’s fourth-largest auto manufacturing state.

Airbus could do the same for Alabama’s aerospace industry, which already employs more than 80,000, primarily in the Huntsville area.

Airbus plans to assemble A320 single-aisle jets in Mobile beginning in 2015, but the project is already having an impact far beyond the state’s borders. The factory, which will employ about 1,000 at full production of four planes per month, is Airbus’ first manufacturing site on U.S. soil, expanding the European company’s global reach and giving it a strategic foothold against rival Boeing Co.

“It represents the real transformation of Airbus into a truly global company,” said Airbus President and CEO Fabrice Brégier at Monay’s groundbreaking

Airbus ranks as the world’s single largest customer for U.S. aerospace suppliers, purchasing more than $13 billion in American aircraft parts last year. The Mobile plant should only increase that figure, spreading jobs across a national network of suppliers that stretches from California to Connecticut.

Many of those companies are actively looking for industrial locations near Brookley, which sprawls over 1,600 acres just south of Interstate 10 and adjacent to the Port of Mobile.

The first supplier to land at Brookley is Safran Engineering Services, which cut the ribbon Monday on an aerospace engineering office that initially will employ about 50.

“Brookley is situated right in the center of the Gulf Coast aerospace corridor, and the Airbus facility sets us up to be the nucleus of that corridor,” said Bill Sisson, executive director of the Mobile Airport Authority.

Monday’s event was a long time coming for Mobile, which lost its economic engine when Brookley shut down in 1969. At the time, it was the largest base closure in U.S. history.

“It absolutely devastated Mobile,” local historian Michael Thomason said in an interview in 2005. “We lost a lot of very technically skilled, high-paying jobs. There was a glut of housing on the market that nobody could afford. It was a deeply painful experience for the community, and the pain lasted well into the 1980s.”

Haas and other local leaders spent years recruiting aerospace projects to Brookley, finding success with companies like Singapore Technologies, which established an aircraft modification and repair plant in Mobile in 1991. But they struck out on bigger projects including McDonnell Douglas, which eyed Brookley as a production site for MD-12 jets in 1992 and Boeing, which named Mobile as a finalist for its 787 production plant in 2003.

The Airbus project was a study in persistence. Airbus’ parent company, the European Aeronautic Defense and Space Co., in 2005 proposed to build refueling tankers for the Air Force at a $600 million factory at Brookley.

The company spent the next few years battling Boeing for the tanker contract, initially winning it in a shocking upset in 2008. But the jubilation in Mobile was short-lived. The Pentagon ordered a do-over of the competition and awarded the deal to Boeing in 2011.

Officials with EADS and Airbus said they remained committed to building aircraft at Brookley and eventually found a strong business case for the A320, one of the world’s best-selling aircraft.

Airbus currently assembles A320 aircraft in Toulouse, France; Hamburg, Germany; and Tianjin, China. The company has delivered more than 5,500 of the narrow-body jets worldwide and has a backlog of more than 4,000 on order to airline customers.

Airbus officials said Monday that the Mobile plant will be critical to helping them meet worldwide demand for new planes, and that Brookley will become the “epicenter of commercial activity” for Airbus in the U.S.

“I look at it as a renaissance of the Gulf Coast region and specifically Mobile, Alabama, when it comes to commercial activity in the aerospace sector,” said Allan McArtor, chairman of Airbus Americas.